Uh-oh-7: How a virus spooked Hollywood
Movie industry’s jitters makes reality scarier
If the movie business is a reliable indicator of anything, it’s how much people responsible for great sums of money think something is going to cost. This is why the news this week that MGM and Paramount have decided to refrain from releasing the latest instalment in the James Bond franchise, No Time To Die, in April as intended, and withhold its release until November, has people rather alarmed.
Movie studios are famously calculating and avaricious, and not disposed to making sudden changes rashly. Having already spent millions on a spring marketing campaign for Bond 25 — and having now to open the film against Marvel’s Eternals and Godzilla vs. King Kong — this delay seems an exceptionally risky proposition, one that could determine whether No Time To Die is a failure or a success.
What can we conclude from this decision? If nothing else, that they wouldn’t be doing it without cause.
Historically, delaying the release of a high-profile movie is an omen about the calibre of the movie. It doesn’t preclude the possibility that the movie will turn out to be a hit or even any good — but it does strongly suggest that the studio either has a tremendous lack of faith in the product or that a behind-the-scenes catastrophe has somehow rendered it unreleasable.
Much more rarely is a blockbuster pushed back as a consequence of extenuating circumstances, as when the Arnold Schwarzenneger vehicle Collateral Damage was tastefully delayed from its planned release in September 2001 until February 2002, in recognition of 9/11. Naturally, when it finally opened, the movie flopped.
With tens of millions of dollars at stake, MGM and Paramount must be very frightened indeed of the effect of the novel coronavirus on the state of movie-going this spring. Cinemas throughout China have already been shuttering in an effort to quell the spread of the disease, and as governments worldwide continue to discourage public gatherings by shutting down various events and amusements, going to the movies seems like an obvious, even inevitable casualty in the war against infection. The Chinese box office alone is indispensable to Hollywood release strategies; with it hobbled or even shut down temporarily, whole entertainment fortunes are in jeopardy. If it gets much worse in the United States and Canada, we might avoid the theatre and stay home to watch movies en masse too.
Like a lot of the policies enacted in the wake of the virus’ spread, the decision to withhold No Time to Die is best regarded as a precautionary measure — a safer bet than releasing the movie at a time when disease is in the public consciousness and the direction it will soon take remains unclear. But like heading to grocery store to find the shelves emptied of bottled water and canned goods, seeing a big movie like this pulled from its long-set schedule has the strange effect of making the threat seem more real. If it isn’t safe for James Bond, for Christ’s sake, how safe are we? That’s bound to whip people into a frenzy. The scope and scale of the virus, the degree to which it is or isn’t being effectively contained, is still something of a mystery. Now that Hollywood is responding, it’s best we don’t get too scared.